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69
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
52/100Critics
86/100Scholars
Author:
Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Genevieve West
Publisher:
Amistad
Date:
January 18, 2022
One of the most acclaimed artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston was a gifted novelist, playwright, and essayist. Drawn from three decades of her work, this anthology showcases her development as a writer, from her early pieces expounding on the beauty and precision of African American art to some of her final published works.
What The Reviewers Say
This expansive volume, in five parts, revises existing perceptions of Hurston, like her well-known opposition to school integration and Richard Wright’s objection to her use of African American vernacular. Essays...help to clarify Hurston’s previously misunderstood positions, rooting them in her deep appreciation for African American language and culture, her unquestionable commitment to people of color and their welfare on American soil.
... a dazzling collection of her work.
Five or six of these essays are obvious masterpieces of the form, their sting utterly intact. There’s a lot of filler here, too, though—mundane essays that, if you removed Hurston’s name, could have been written by anyone.
... a garden-fresh collection of Hurston’s nonfiction cocurated by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Genevieve West. One can never have too much Zora in one’s intellectual diet. And these testimonies, tirades, reveries, and reportage—some of them never before published—forge a vibrant simulacrum of a ferociously independent, disarmingly mercurial sensibility whose complex legacy and even knottier personality we’re still trying to figure out decades after her death in 1960 at age sixty-nine. The reignited tensions of this new century likely will make her just as bemusing to contemporary readers, white and Black. But she has always made it fun for all of us to stick our heads in the game.
